All Quiet on the Western Front
One last letter before prison.
Dear fellow humans,
Hello. I am Ryan, and I am an alcoholic.
I am a person. A person who, like you, has two arms and two legs and a head and eyes and feet. I have two offspring and a big lil’ black cat named Nemo who joined the Night’s Watch and moved up north. I am weird, and I am a Scorpio (but don’t call me weirdo). I am probably not a robot. I like things that make me happy — like colors — and other human beings. I like love, warmth, and food that tastes good. I, like you, am made unwell when things happen that are both unsuspected and not ideal. But I—like you—am resilient, have learned to try to maintain that only I can be the one who has a say in the circumstances that make my life, for better or for worse, because no other person alive has more power over me than me, and I cannot say that were I in your shoes, I would have done anything differently at all. Because if I lived your life, I’d be you. I would have all your memories and your experiences, I would be the person that your life shaped you into, and I would think and feel and do all the things you think and feel and do.
We have gone through many prototypes to get to current model, and I think we are finally ready to release a stable product. We here at Ryan Co. understand that every individual is the lead actor of the movie that is his or her life. And we also believe that no one life has any more value than another. Sure, some lives may affect other lives more—or less; for better—or worse—but we don’t think that any individual shingle is better than any other upon the roof (though some do have a different view, or serve a different purpose). From Jesus Christ to Ghengis Khan to Mickey Mouse to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to John Galt, every existence that has ever existed is exactly as it should have been for today to be. And that is a — O.K.
Though we may not all understand the language the other might speak, I think we can all agree that in an ideal world, we’d all just be able to have Butterfingers and watch ‘Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows: Part 2’ after a long and fulfilling day at the zoo. Surrounded by all of our loved ones, with no traffic on the way home, and no violence in the media, and no dishonesty around us. And with carne asada burritos. Always with each person feeling happy with who they are inside and out, everyone looking forward for the next day to dawn, because there are people close to them that are going to be happy that they are alive and around. I think that because we have all been through so much, we could maybe just hit the “reset” button and start a new game. It’s not like starting all over. The foundations are still there. All those millennia of learning and loving and hurting that had to have happened so that someone could some day tell the story of a brave little boy or girl who, against all odds, overcame much adversity met with, and after armistice, did turn around to help the “enemy” because they understood that even though they may have once been at odds, they are still in close proximity, are neighbors upon this world, who do both require love and warmth to exist at peace—and so they do come to a peace, for the sake of posterity and all that is good.
I would a peace with all the world. There are no people on this planet that have done anything so wrong toward us thus far as to warrant any energy expended toward retribution in any shape or form, and going forward there is no sin great enough to elicit such kanly.
I hope summer is warm where you are. Thank you, 2019.
[And ’20, ’21, ’22, ‘23… ad infinitum]
